Which Side Is the Left On?

New York Times ^ | October 7, 2001 | Michael Kazin

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BEFORE Sept. 11, American progressives had reason to hope they might be emerging from the political wilderness. After years of bitter squabbles over identity politics and the merits of the Clinton administration, the left appeared to have reclaimed its anti-corporate heritage and was growing.

For the first time since the 1930's, student activists and labor officials championed the same causes. At dozens of colleges, groups sought to curb sweatshop manufacturing in the developing world and to demand a living wage for employees at home. Organizers were predicting 100,000 protesters, including many union members, would be in Washington in late September during the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party exulted that President Bush's poll ratings were not much higher than the percentage of the vote he had won a year before and that his administration seemed without a purpose beyond cutting taxes. Chances looked good that a liberal coalition could help take back the House of Representatives in 2002 and maybe the White House in 2004.

Those hopes, and the prospect of a unified left, disappeared along with so much else in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack. While labor leaders and liberal lawmakers endorse the administration's anti-terrorist campaign, radical foes of global capital on college campuses and the streets talk of peace and try to grasp why many in the Islamic world seem to hate the United States.

In pleading their case, each segment of the left evokes the metaphors of an earlier war — using two very different examples. For the embattled new peace movement, the war is Vietnam; for anti-terrorist liberals, it is World War II.

Indeed, the arguments of many peace activists echo those New Leftists made 30 years ago. "The fear and desperation that grows [sic] from poverty and oppression is crucial to any understanding of violence throughout the world," says a group called the Anti-Capitalist Convergence. Even symbols of the earlier movement are making a comeback — an ad in The Nation features the peace symbol, now colored red, white and blue.

Accused of being anti-American, peace demonstrators respond that they are upholding the most humane of secular and spiritual ideals — protection of the innocent in a world where the gulf between the rich and poor is ever widening. As with Vietnam, radicals accuse American policymakers of caring about acts of mass slaughter only when their own citizens are its victims.

Meanwhile, most liberals and a few chastened radicals view the Sept. 11 attacks through the prism of World War II. For them, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban represent what the author Christopher Hitchens labels, "fascism with an Islamic face." Echoing the words of Mr. Bush, the anti-terrorist left maintains there is a moral imperative to defend a society that remains, whatever its flaws, a pillar of ethnic and religious pluralism and representative democracy.

Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, entered politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. But the religious zealots who destroyed the World Trade Center and blasted the Pentagon remind the Jewish liberal of the Nazis; she vows "to stop that from happening again." Labor officials now struggling to help the families of the hundreds of union workers killed on Sept. 11 — cooks and waiters, janitors and security guards, as well as firemen and police — are hardly inclined to disagree.

This is no time to talk of peace, such progressives insist, before action is taken to punish those who planned the attacks and prevent them from committing further carnage. Repeating a charge hurled against isolationists 60 years earlier, liberals accuse opponents to their left of being naïve about the threat posed to a system in which a culture of opposition can flourish.

This debate within the left also parallels divisions evident in earlier wars. In the 20th century, visionary altruists were both the leaders of America during each major conflict and spearheaded the opposition.

In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson insisted American troops were needed to make the world "safe for democracy," while pacifists and Socialists charged the doughboys were only protecting the profits of munitions makers and British imperialists. In 1940, leftists and isolationists made a similar indictment against Franklin D. Roosevelt when he urged passage of Lend-Lease and the revival of the draft. (It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to squelch or convert his opponents.) In 1965, most progressive Democrats backed Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to defend the "freedom" of South Vietnam, while young radicals argued that the liberal president was using American power to crush a war of independence against foreign rule.

EACH of these ruptures affected the future of American politics in significant ways. The divisions over World War I and Vietnam — unpopular wars — helped conservative Republicans dominate Congress and the White House in the 1920's and most of the 1970's and 80's. But most progressives backed World War II as a battle against the enemies of freedom, and their cherished causes of industrial unionism and racial tolerance gained as the fighting raged.

Now, though President Bush is a Republican, he is using words saturated with historic left ideals to win the confidence of many Americans. In his address to Congress, the president condemned the Taliban for barring women from school and prohibiting any religious doctrine but their own. He has also condemned acts of prejudice against Arab-Americans and wants to help unemployed workers pay for health insurance. Mr. Bush's oratory of war sounds a good deal like the reformist internationalism that guided the foreign policy of Democratic presidents from Wilson to Bill Clinton.

Anti-terrorist liberals hope the war will be limited and that, as after Pearl Harbor, the communal spirit that has animated New Yorkers and other Americans since Sept. 11 will stir a desire to ease domestic injustices. Antiwar radicals want Americans to put down their flags and address the global ills that the demonstrations in Washington were intended to dramatize.

But activists on both sides fear their chance to build a new left may already have passed.

[mafree]

Yes it could. The private sector can do a lot of things we let the gub'mint take care of.

[hoot2]

"Which Side Is the Left On?"

they aren't on sides...
they like to "swing both ways"

[hoot2]

Damn Commies... Audio